Archive for
February, 2011

(YouTube link)
Thanks to auto-tune and video editing, the late George Carlin can add singing and dancing to his repertoire of stand up comedy. Remix by by DJ Steve Porter & DJ Eli Wilkie (Agent 001). -via I Am Bored

After last week’s post on Flo and Kay, the world’s only female autistic savant identical twins, I’ve been really interested in savants and all the amazing things they can do. So I dug up some videos that demonstrate savants’ abilities, and hopefully you’ll find them as impressive as I do.
This is the amazing story of [...]

Mini Shopping Cart Desk Organizer – $9.95
Springtime is nearly here and it is time to organize that mess you call a desk. Get to it with the Mini Shopping Cart Desk Organizer from the NeatoShop.
The Mini Shopping Cart Desk Organizer from the NeatoShop, because you aren’t ordinary. You are extraordinary! You are also a little [...]

Sure, we’ve all seen pictures of a space shuttle docking. But this one was taken from Earth using a fairly ordinary telescope guided by hand:
This remarkable picture was taken by Rob Bullen on Saturday February 26 from the UK, using an 8.5? telescope. I’ll note that’s relatively small as telescopes go! But the ISS is [...]

(Video Link)
In 1993, an early Internet user named John Allen explained that the Internet was and would continue to be a place of remarkable civility and courtesy. Warning: text displayed during the video is NSFW.
I began using the Internet in 1995, so I can only assume that this genteel atmosphere that Allen spoke of collapsed [...]

Turbo, an 11 year old doberman, wandered away from his home on Marco Island, Florida. He was found fifteen hours later in a canal not far from his home, alive but exhausted. The dog likely spent the entire night in the canal before a neighbor rescued him after being alerted by dolphins who kept the [...]

Japanese designer Kota Nezu made a parasol that is a functional sundial. There’s a compass built into the handle to that you can point it in the right direction and get a reading on the time.
Link via OhGizmo!

Michael Kalish created this elaborate sculpture that, when viewed from the right angle, looks like Muhammad Ali:
[...]artist Michael Kalish went big, using 1,300 punching bags, 6.5 miles of stainless steel cable, and 2,500 pounds of aluminum pipe to construct a 22-foot-high installation that took three years to complete.
The idea for the project came to Kalish [...]

Tyler Cowen, an economist and the blogger behind Marginal Revolution, was asked by a reader:
Who do you think will still be famous in 10,000 years? People from history or now. Shakespeare? Socrates? Hawking?
He answered (in part):
In that case, I’ll go with the major religious leaders (Jesus, Buddha, etc.), Einstein, Turing, Watson and Crick, Hitler, the [...]

In Salon, Laura Miller writes about a novel by Yisroel Markov which tells the LoTR story from Mordor’s point of view. Here’s a summary of The Last Ringbearer:
In Yeskov’s retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science “destroys the harmony [...]